


Commitment to a Point

by merry_magpie



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-16
Updated: 2010-08-16
Packaged: 2017-10-11 03:09:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/107696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merry_magpie/pseuds/merry_magpie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Once committed beyond a certain point he should not worry himself too much." – Samuel Butler</p>
            </blockquote>





	Commitment to a Point

What Methos had done, in joining the Watchers, went beyond commitment to a new identity. He had created a masterpiece of personality and subsumed the tattered remnants of something he could call his original one. What was left of the mortal who died and became Methos? He had no idea. Every stable point he had to hang a personality on had eventually eroded. At best, he had long running traditions and opinions.

To join the Watchers in this modern time meant becoming quiet, and easily overlooked in an organization of men and women who made it their job to be quiet and easily overlooked. It meant staying away from other Immortals, hiding in the stacks of libraries and archives. In other words, a fine way to spend 20 years.

What Methos had done in admitting his identity to Duncan MacLeod, of the Bloody Clan MacLeod didn't break his commitment to Adam Pierson, but expanded and deepened it. Suddenly, as if newly Immortal again, he was thrown into a world much bigger than the box in which Adam had been so comfortable. What had been a lightly-scripted tableau became an improvised farce, slamming doors and mistaken identity included. Adam grew up, but was essentially Adam still, and while he was cautious sometimes to the point of paranoia, he was also comfortable.

It was the knife in his heart, the return of Kronos, which finally tested Methos' resolve and commitment to the role of Adam Pierson. Adam Pierson would die in Kronos' hands, the myth called Methos, elusive as he was even to the man who claimed the name, might even die in Kronos' hands. Only one man had survived Kronos, and that had been Death. Death was the perfection of commitment to a character, not a thought out of place, every action economical and mindless.

But Death was repellant to Adam; also, necessary. And finally after millennia, Methos had forced two personalities so divergent, to co-mingle, and in doing so something of a new man emerged. One named Methos, for no other name was needed. And if he wondered whether this Methos had anything to do with any Methos before, well he wasn't worried.


End file.
